Prairie Ethnography (1)—Lutefisk Dinner

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Prairie Ethnography."

[a] With trimmings RF

I settled into the middle of the smooth, wooden pew. It was a clear, October Saturday in southern Wisconsin, and the Orfordville Lutheran Church was filled with a Sunday morning service-sized crowd. The altar area conveyed the calm, embracing theological narrative of Missouri Synod Lutheranism. Doves mingled with candelabra and pulpit, with just one (major) thing askew. Dwarfing the altar was a screen showing a slideshow of the church, its history, its Norwegian roots, and the heartbeat of life circulating the church calendar.

In the pews, people talked quietly in groups ranging from two to as many as a dozen. Every once in a while a comment—"...remember that summer?" "...that's Timmy from my Sunday School class; he must be in high school now"—would flutter from the flock. Autumnal sun flowed through stained glass. Everyone (and I mean everyone) clutched little tickets.

Under the church rafters, we were in queue. Every five, maybe ten, minutes the crowd quieted and listened as a slight man with a microphone intoned "...fourteen twenty-one through fourteen twenty-eight"; "is there a group of six ready?"; "do we have a single?...there's room for one more." At each prompt, clusters of gray hair ambled to the portal of promise. Above the door were the words Careful Steps.

[b] Sushi... RF

The sacred space above ground was merely the holding pen on this day. The real event was downstairs, in the basement. There, teeming energy and rumbling stomachs turned toward cranberries, meatballs, coffee, milk, drawn butter and the pièce(s) de résistance—lutefisk and lefse. It was the Orfordville Lutheran Church's annual Lutefisk Dinner, and Norwegians of a certain age drive from all around the countryside to pay $15 for unlimited helpings of lefse (a food most everyone likes) and a form of codfish that has been soaked in lye before being rinsed and processed for cooking. The culinary result is a plate that looks a little like the South Korean flag—mostly white, with dashes of cosmologically-patterned color to provide balance. Dominating the scene is a hunk of gelatinous ocean steak, all but wriggling in front of you.

It is an acquired taste.

One normally acquires this taste while growing up. The bar to appreciating this odd immigrant food is set so high that it is the truly exceptional eater who learns to eat it as an adult. Indeed, so odd is this culinary staple that it is not at all unusual for several children in the same family to be split on its merits. My own sister won't touch it, but I somehow took to the soft, gooey texture as though it were just another flavor in the Gerber's panaroma of flavors.

I have enjoyed it ever since, and took it for granted—as the growing Norwegian boy with the French surname on the banks of the Red River Valley—that lutefisk would grace every holiday table. That assumption held well into my twenties, and then I got busy. Certainly, there was no lutefisk to be found during the two years I spent in Taiwan after college, and there was precious little of it anywhere near the shores of Lake Michigan during my graduate studies. Off to my first job I went, in central Maine. There was plenty of seafood—even cod—but no one seemed to want to soak it in lye until it became a wiggly lump of fish flesh. I mean, they ate bottom feeders like lobsters, for Thor's sake.

[c] Gelatin RF

And then, in the late-1990s, I boarded the next ship for Wisconsin, and lutefisk started appearing in everyday vocabulary again. You see, there are plenty of Norwegians in the Midwest, and Wisconsin was one of the destinations for the first wave of settlers. My great grandmother was born in the Wisconsin countryside in the late-nineteenth century, and both my grandparents and parents grew up around the rich, fertile soil on the eastern border of North Dakota and the western border of Minnesota. Lutefisk dinners—almost always prepared at home—were the order of the (holi-)day.

Let's just say that times have changed, and there is not nearly as much home cooking of the ubiquitous codfish as in earlier days. In my personal history, I can trace the change to the early-1980s. The surprising thing is that I have found a good deal of agreement about that date (give or take a few years) when talking to lutefisk eaters of all ages. Every time that I ask the question "do you still make lutefisk at home?," I get answers that range from "sometimes" to "not at all anymore." When did the big change take place? About 1980.

Is it Ronald Wilson Reagan's fault?

Well, probably not (although I remain vigilant for clues from the repast). It seems that a little institution—always there, but never dominant until the 1980s—began to take the place of the home-style lutefisk dinner. It brings hungry Scandinavians together in a Durkheimian flurry of social and culinary energy that starts with lefse and ends with pie. Instead of grandma doing the soaking (in lye, remember), the rinsing (an absolutely necessary step, let us not forget), and the baking...other groups have picked up some of the preparatory slack. Now it is Lutheran churches and Sons of Norway posts that sponsor lutefisk dinners that reach out to hundreds (and occasionally over a thousand) hungry connoisseurs.

[d] Lye RF

It has become a mixture of business, fundraising, and community pride linked to a taste that will not die. The question of its future is another one, though. Will it trickle to a halt when my generation heads to that great plastic tub of lye in the sky? Let's not kid ourselves. The clienetele is distinctly, well, middle-aged, and getting up there would be a generous way of putting it. I asked several of the servers (well-brushed junior high school and high school students serving the church on an autumn weekend day) if they liked lutefisk. Nope.

While this might be a little bit of a "generational" thing, I suspect that lutefisk dinners are the last (several generation) stop on the train to oblivion. First, people stopped making it at home. In time, it is quite likely that it will give way to a fully-formed American identity that doesn't require "Norwegian" in front of it and doesn't recognize lye-soaked codfish as either staple or treat.

Still, I can't help but think of my academic roots in ethnography. In China and Japan, I see parallels to the situation, even as I sense that lutefisk can't compete with centuries-old Asian traditions. You see, I have been studying East Asian cultural traditions for almost thirty years now, and in Japan I keep hearing young people say that "Sumo (wrestling) is boring; it is for old people." In China, young people tell me that "Beijing opera is for old people; young people aren't interested in such things." Yet they just keep on going. I would think that the traditions would wear out if I only had my own ethnographic work and anecdotes to go on. That is why doing historical research is so useful to the ethnographer. Even thirty years can't begin to provide adequate perspective to ongoing, even iconic, cultural practices. Imagine my surprise, then, to read accounts in Japan and China from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries predicting the demise of sumo and opera. Young people in the 1890s (in both countries) scoffed at the "olden ways" of their elders. Yet the last time I checked the calendar it was 2011, and the practices just keep on cranking (with an organized crime scandal mixed in here and there for good measure).

[e] Stalking the wild lutefisk RF

So what do we make of lutefisk? Is it going to have the resilience of sumo wrestling and Beijing opera? Is it going to be a steady force of culinary culture on the Scandinavian-American prairie?

Nope. Probably not. If you are forty-five years old or more, just keep on eatin'. Lutefisk will stick to the ol' ribs during your lifetime. If you are in, say, your twenties, you had better get your field notebook ready and head out for some serious prairie research before the elusive fish is extinct.

I'll see you in Orfordville, Wisconsin on Saturday, October 27, 2012.

Flowers Bloom (4)—Prairie Enculturation

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Flowers Bloom."

[a] "Flat"  RF

 During the summer, I will be posting segments of a memoir project I have begun that discusses teaching, learning, scholarship, reading...and the venerable, odd University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, whose bestseller The Closing of the American Mind rocked American education almost twenty-five years ago. I have already written a little bit about Bloom on this blog, and had promised to start posting more pieces starting in June. Read the introduction to the series if you want the full context, but the individual posts are meant to be read on their own (with hints throughout of the larger context).

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6 

Flowers Bloom—A Teaching Memoir
Prairie Enculturation

My passion for the study of culture also began early. My father is an anthropologist, and Northwest Coast Indian art filled our home. Dad’s office was dotted with Kwakiutl fishing spears and Tsimshian raven carvings, and I can remember discussing society and culture almost as soon as I could participate in conversation. I was not much beyond the age at which I suspected Santa Claus to be far from “other”—and could locate him fairly easily within my extended kinship network as variously uncle, grandfather, or mother’s brother’s eldest son—when my dad explained our Christmas rituals according to Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift. I loved the name that I then pronounced as Marcel Mouse, and could see his point—that presents have a way of forcing obligation. I had already noticed this at birthday parties, as well as in the half-hearted messages (“the present is from the kids”) that adults seemed determined to impart, even as we children turned our attention elsewhere. Most of all, it gave me a way of understanding how adults could ruin a perfectly happy occasion by creating overlapping layers of “gift-opening rules” that frustrated me beyond measure (Shelly goes first and we all watch, then great-grandma, and then Robby).

[b] Prairie imagination  RF

As I grew older, fieldwork and anthropological theory figured prominently in family time. While other families went to the North Dakota-Manitoba Peace Garden, Disney World, or the Wisconsin Dells, we had “fieldwork vacations,” learning about local culture wherever we went, even as my mother read to us from Edith Hamilton’s retellings of Greek and Roman myths. I distinctly remember staying at an Amish commune, as well as taking a long trip one summer to British Columbia that introduced me to Northwest Coast Indian culture and the wildly alliterative name (echoing my fascination with Marcel Mauss) of the Kwakiutl artist Mungo Martin. I already imagined myself an ethnographer, and filled notebooks with reflections on my travels. Heavy vapors of romanticism worked upon me, but still—especially “in the field” in British Columbia—I reveled in the mood as I worked my way through several Big Chief^® tablets at the picnic table outside of the family camper.

In time, I upgraded to narrow-ruled notebooks, and could not help but turn my note-taking ambitions to the cultural practices of eastern North Dakota. It was there that I learned how deeply language and culture are intertwined. Every Thanksgiving, my great aunts, grandmother, and seemingly every neighbor on the Dakota plains would start a methodical production of Norwegian pastries. No sooner were the late-night snack plates, turkey sandwiches, and pumpkin pie cleared away than—in an era before Black Friday—these formidable women would haul out the specialized instruments of culinary warfare. Lefse irons and krumkake rollers joined the pots, pans, and baking sheets dotting the kitchen. Even a child could sense the competition in the air. While I returned to my elementary studies in Wisconsin, they baked. Speaking periodically on the phone, they gave each other updates on the number of lefse, kringle, krumkake, and fattigman in process. By the third week of December, each home held a shrine to Norwegian pastry—an impossibly layered tray of baked flour and sugar organized by shape and texture, ready for consumption.

[c] Just a hint (you have no idea)  RF

And reloading. Behind the yuletide dining room scene, the kitchens held formidable reserves. People were expected to visit, and visitors were expected to eat. Every evening, they restocked the display trays. Throughout the Red River Valley, the cyclical itineraries of visiting and eating called to mind the patterns of entreaty and obligation I had learned from Marcel Mauss. It was public and it was performative. Even then, I could not help but think of Kwakiutl Indian chiefs doing ostentatious battle with massive stores of blankets and salmon—all vying in the potlatch for what we call today “cultural capital.” The prolific bakers were famous throughout the valley, and their pastries might be talked about for generations.

And it’s all history. I always associated that world with generations beyond my own. Because I came to visit—doing historical fieldwork, as it were—I spent time almost solely with my grandparents’ and even great-grandparents’ generations.

When I returned from Madison for the culmination of the holidays, we, too, would hit the road. In the winter of 1971, just months after the Minnesota Twins had completed what turned out to be a lackluster (74-86) season, we took the winding country roads from eastern North Dakota, over the Red River, and on to the “Minnesota side”—an hour’s trip through several Scandinavian subcultures. Grain elevators towered over railroad tracks—the juxtaposed linchpins of a fading economy linking towns such as Finley, Taft, and Perley with Fargo, Minneapolis, and Chicago. Even then, as my grandfather told me, Burlington Northern had abandoned thousands of miles of track, and the small town grain elevator was fading away, just as had the dray lines and icehouses of his youth.

Dray lines? Icehouses? I had no concept. Grandpa explained an entire dray line economy with horses and heavy, low carts connecting railroad tracks with stores and homes. Yet it was the icehouses that most intrigued me. Enormous chunks of ice were cut and hauled from the Red River and stored in dark warehouses in the middle of town. Even my father remembers walking into the cool of icehouses as a child, the massive hunks holding a slowly diminishing steadiness under bales of hay, even at the height of summer. I had just learned why my grandparents called that compartment on the passenger side of the car the glove box, and why much more attention was paid to hat racks in their day than in mine. Now I knew why I kept hearing that I should make sure that I don’t stand with the icebox open.

[c] Prairie icehouse  RF

I learned all of these things while sitting among great aunts, uncles, and cousins several generations removed, on holiday visiting feasts in which kringle circulated like so many armbands in the Trobriand Islands. I had already learned to pay attention, to think like an ethnographer about my own culture, and I tried to get it all down when we returned to “base camp” at my grandparents’ home. Before we left Minnesota on that day in 1971, a nonagenarian great-great aunt asked my grandmother, “Did you ever go julekagen?”  My grandma nodded that yes, she had, adding “Those were good times.”

In the car, on the return trip, I asked her about julekagen. She explained that groups of young people would sing Norwegian holiday songs in town. “So it’s Christmas caroling,” I blurted. “Well, yes…and…not exactly,” she added. “It sounds just like it,” I concluded, satisfied that I understood. Grandma wasn’t so sure that I did. She went on to explain some subtleties that today I would call the specifics of cultural practice in the Red River Valley. At the time, though, it seemed simple, and I was sure that I had it figured out. An icebox was an old-fashioned refrigerator; a glove box was an older phrase for glove compartment (even though I never saw anyone store gloves there); and julekagen was Christmas caroling. This history, language, and culture thing didn’t seem quite so difficult, after all. I wrote it all down, and closed my notebook.

***  ***

Years later, sipping coffee in the Ole Store Café in Northfield, Minnesota, I read the Minneapolis StarTribune and speculated, along with the journalists, about whether or not American cyclist Greg Lemond could make up a fifty-one second gap in the final stage of the 1989 Tour de France. The tour organizers had scheduled a time-trial into Paris that day. In most years, during a normal Tour finale, he could never make up the time, and there would be no possibility of victory. In a time trial—a race of rider against the clock (contre la montre, as the French say)—there was a chance, a shred of opportunity. It was unlikely, but it could happen. As I anticipated that day’s events, I also comforted myself by noting that, in addition to summarizing, journalists are required to guess (many call this “prediction”). They are rarely any better at this than the rest of us, and it seemed fitting revenge for the smug certainty that I was sure would follow tomorrow, no matter the results from France.

[d] News  RF

In the booth next to me, I was startled by a tiny voice speaking with a distinctly Norwegian accent. It might have been a great aunt, so close were her enunciations to the linguistic world of my childhood. The Ole Store Café may be near the center of Norwegian culture in Minnesota, but we were far from the Red River Valley of my youth. She was a “native,” and from the homeland. I was sure of it. She spoke again. “Thank you dear,” she told the waitress. “And I think I’ll have some pie.” She stressed the last word, as though it were part of an equation. “Banana cream, please.” The booth walls in the Ole Store were high; I couldn’t see her, and went back to reading my paper—pondering the cycling future.

Minutes later I heard the clink of a plate being set on a table. The tiny voice returned. “Ooohhh…it’s so coooold.” There was a pause, and then the phrase I will always cherish:

Isn’t refrigeration wonderful?

That went into my notebook, too.

This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:

Floral 1         Floral 2          Floral 3          Floral 4          Floral 5          Floral 6

NEXT
Meeting Bloom
It's not at all what you think. I'm no disciple (for better or worse).
 I'll see you there, at the Committee on Social Thought "Sherry Hour" in early October 1987. Don't be late or you'll just get a Bubble-up (remember those?) or a wine cooler (check your history books).